Student Pavan Raj Gowda, 14, was awarded the Environmental Protection Agency's Region Nine President's Environmental Youth Award during a ceremony held at Alsion Montessori in Fremont on April 11.

Congressman Eric Swalwell, D-Dublin, and Environmental Protection Agency Regional Administrator Jared Blumenfeld presented the award to Gowda, who has been championing green causes since he was 4 years old.

Gowda was awarded for his work to increase understanding of environmental issues among children by offering school programs, workshops and online resources through his nonprofit, Green Kids Now Inc. He has also been the brains behind the Green Kids Conference, which will be taking place for the fourth year on May 31 at the Microsoft Silicon Valley campus. The conference aims to introduce children and their families to environmental awareness and issues.

Mother Shanti Balaraman said her son has been concerned with keeping the environment clean from a very early age. Even then he peppered his parents with questions about the environment.

"From preschool, he started singing the 'Clean up' song, and would look outside the window as we were driving and see litter and ask why 'nobody is cleaning up outside,' and ... when he was 8 years old he started openly taking action."

Balaraman and her husband purchased Gowda a website, greenkidsnow.org, for his eighth birthday, to share all the things he researched and learned about the environment. He also used it to post the different projects he was working on, which started small and has evolved to his current plastic recycling project, Green Star School program, and the annual conference.

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She said at the recent awards ceremony he recalled his parents getting tired of his endless questions when he was younger.

"He used to ask so many questions, I would tell him 'can you go find your own answers?' So that's how he started talking to different people about his questions, looking for answers, and writing about the answers and environmental tips he was given," she said.

According to Gowda, "As far as I can remember I have always been very curious and I ask a lot of questions. One day my parents told me to stop asking them and find my own answers, so then I started asking other people questions like Sandy, the local park ranger about the local ecosystem ... and I put everything I found on my website in the form of articles, tips, artwork and so on."

His work did not go unnoticed. City of Fremont asked him to be an exhibitor at the Earth Day Fair, and from there his projects and organization grew. More than a year later, his parents registered Green Kids Now Inc. as a nonprofit.

"So now I am interested in self study. One thing I am interested is in biomimicry (the imitation of the models, systems and elements of nature to solve complex human problems) ... because a lot of the things around us are unsustainable like a majority of plastic. You know, when we made plastics we did not consider all the bad things that could happen because of them," Gowda explained. "So now we know from our previous mistakes... that the right way to make plastics is to by thinking about environmental sustainability from the beginning and thinking about how to reinnovate things and solve some of our most challenging technological problems with biomimicry."

The subject of plastic production and recycling really gets Gowda going, and his plastic caps recycling projects is one of the projects he will be presenting at the conference, which has had an attendance of 800 since it began. The second, in conjunction with Cargill, a food processing company, is "Striving for Zero Waste Community," an awareness campaign about waste in the community that aims to reach 30,000 people in 2014.

His interest in recycling plastic bottle caps was spawned when he saw a picture of a dead albatross two years ago, —...what really shocked me was that its body was decayed but completely filled with plastic caps."

So Gowda set off to learn about plastic production and recycling, learning along the way that plastic is one of the top 10 ocean pollutants and that the plastic caps on bottles are only recycled at a 10 percent rate, while the actual bottle is recycled at a 30 percent rate.

"So I was really confused because I thought the caps were small, so they aren't being recycled as much. What I found is that the cap and the bottle are made from two different types of material," and can't be melted down together, causing an inconvenience for many recyclers, Gowda said.

The project Gowda has set up to address this is to place plastic collections at various locations throughout Fremont for residents to drop off bottles and caps, which will be separated and stored until multiple loads of 1,500 pounds are collected. The bottle caps will then be transported to AHG Recycling in Newark to be shredded and recycled.

Gowda, who started the first Green Kids Conference when he was 10, said that after attending other science and green fairs, he thought they were too commercialized, and that they only focused on waste management instead of environmental care, and showcased recent innovations and resources. He decided to make a free children-friendly environmental conference that not only informed attendees, but also moved them to action.

Gowda said he does not get overwhelmed by all his undertakings, which he primarily does by himself, including presenting to different companies to sponsor the conference and his projects.

He said his parents' role has been to support him and provide him with resources and connections, as well as help promote the organization.

"Well I am only getting the resources for him, all the planning is him though. He is particular that adults don't give him ideas, they help in the background after he has planned ... his ideas and vision are all his," Balaraman said. "The financial part I am taking care of, I am his main donor."

Gowda was encouraged by an EPA staff member to apply for the President's Award in 2012, and was announced as a winner in 2013.

Winners are traditionally flown to the White House to present their work, however, the government shutdown at the time grounded those plans. Instead, Gowda was presented the award at his school by Swalwell and Blumenfeld earlier this month.

Gowda received a standing innovation at the award ceremony, which brought tears to Balaraman's eyes.

"Me and my husband were standing in the back and it was very emotional for us," she said.

She added that her 7-year-old daughter Amita is following in her brother's footsteps.

Gowda, in addition to writing two books, "Geckoboy: The Battle of Fracking" and "Two Tales from a Kid" is also actively helping schools to obtain the Green Star Award, which is sponsored by the United Nations and nonprofit Green Star International, by providing simple guidelines to do so.

Millard, Oliveira and Chadbourne elementary schools in Fremont have already joined the program and Gowda is hoping to start the process at Glenmoor Elementary School by next year.

He said he is self-inspired. "I knew there was a big problem in the environment at a very young age, I didn't want to sit there and do nothing, so I was inspired to be part of the solution."